BA Components manufactures bespoke kitchens and components from two state of the art factories in Cookstown, Northern Ireland and in Doncaster, England. It supplies into many of the best-known kitchen and hardware brands in the UK and Ireland. Anne McLaughlin, who leads compliance and continuous improvement there as Business Improvement Manager, has been our main point of contact throughout, and the relationship we have built with her and the team over the past three years is one we value a great deal.
Back in 2023, BA wanted to understand its own carbon footprint properly, as part of the ESG strategy the company had already committed to. Rather than starting from what anyone else was asking for, they started from wanting to know, which is generally the sign of an organisation that intends to do something with the answer.
We were appointed through Invest NI’s Energy and Resource Efficiency support framework to carry out an energy audit and carbon footprint assessment at Cookstown, with three things in mind: quantifying Scope 1 and 2 emissions, understanding and identifying the Scope 3 emissions that sit across the wider value chain, and finding practical opportunities to bring emissions down.
That first project gave BA a baseline, and it gave Anne a working understanding of how the calculation is actually put together, which turned out to matter a great deal for what came next.
What has developed since is genuinely collaborative. Anne now calculates the majority of BA's annual emissions herself, drawing on what she learned during our original project, and our role has become a guiding one: reviewing the data, verifying the figures, checking the supporting documentation and approving the final position, with feedback where anything needs adjusting.
For a company with capable people in place, this is a highly efficient way to work. The internal knowledge stays internal, the cost stays proportionate, and the independent check is there where it counts.
There is a lot of ground to cover each year before those figures are ready. Across two sites, the annual exercise pulls together evidence on biomass, fleet mileage, electricity and water invoices, raw materials, outbound packaging materials, process and materials waste, recycling and inbound materials transportation, and it takes Anne several weeks of work to assemble.
Streamlined Energy and Carbon Reporting, usually shortened to SECR, is a UK requirement for larger companies to disclose their energy use and carbon emissions within their filed annual accounts, along with the energy efficiency measures they have taken during the year. Plenty of manufacturers are within scope without having given it much thought until an accountant raises it. (See the FAQs below for who qualifies and what it involves.)
For BA, the reporting runs through the business at a senior level. Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions are reviewed with the CEO and compared against the previous year. The SECR disclosure statement covering Scope 1 and 2 is prepared and approved by the CEO and the Finance Director, then shared with the remaining shareholders at board level alongside the Scope 3 figures, before the company's chartered accountants review it ahead of inclusion in the filed accounts. From the outset, BA have committed to Scope 3 reporting, spending the time collating tonnage data on product packaging, as well as other key raw materials used in product manufacturing, including wood, plastics and metal fixings.
Figures that travel that far, into audited accounts and in front of shareholders, need to be right, and our part in that is making sure they are defensible before they go anywhere.
Because the SECR statement also records the energy efficiency actions taken during the year, BA's disclosures have become a running account of a company steadily investing in its own performance:
- Aug 2023: Invest NI energy and carbon assessment completed
- Jan 2024: ESOS site energy audit completed
- Mar 2024: 1,248 kWp solar PV installed
- Jan 2025: smart meters installed to monitor real-time consumption
- Feb 2025: ESOS Phase 3 assessment completed
- Mar 2025: fleet cars transitioned to hybrid electric
- Mar 2026: forklift trucks transitioning from internal combustion to electric
Alongside that sits a good deal of work that does not fit neatly into a timeline: sustainable packaging improvements, FSC and PEFC certified MDF sourcing in support of sustainable forest management, and product literature printed on FSC certified, carbon balanced paper or issued digitally instead. Customers are certainly asking for evidence of ethical sourcing and environmental responsibility in a way they were not a few years ago, but the investment behind that list has been driven by BA itself.
Having several years of reliable organisational data behind you changes what you are able to say yes to, and in 2025 that was exactly what happened. During an audit by a Tier 1 OEM customer, BA was asked whether it measured the carbon footprint of its products, the customer having committed to reaching net zero by 2040 and recognising, as manufacturers with targets of that kind increasingly do, that they will only get there in partnership with their supply chain.
Because the groundwork was already in place, BA was in a position to act on the question rather than simply note it, and work began on a product carbon footprint for the membrane-pressed Bella range, the largest range in the company's retail channel. What began as a question in an audit became an opportunity to open up a level of detail that had not been available to the business before.
What the customer had not done, and this is almost always the case, was specify how the footprint should be calculated or how far it needed to go. They were looking for information that would allow them to make a judgement about their own supply chain, and the shape of that information was left open.
Scoping it is a good part of what we do, because a product footprint can be taken to almost any level of detail. We set the standard for BA at PACT Methodology v3.0, the Partnership for Carbon Transparency's methodology for calculating and exchanging cradle-to-gate product carbon footprints, which meant Anne and the team knew from the outset which data they needed to gather, how far along the value chain to go and where it was reasonable to stop, rather than spending weeks producing figures nobody was ever going to ask for. It also means the finished footprint can be shared with the customer and used directly, since it has been produced to a methodology they already recognise.
The most useful finding so far has been about where the emissions actually sit. Despite everything BA controls and continues to improve within its own operations, a substantial share of the product's footprint is dictated by supply chain logistics and geography.
Knowing that with confidence is what makes it addressable. It tells the business where its attention is worth spending, and it turns supplier and logistics decisions into something that can be measured rather than estimated.
Streamlined Energy and Carbon Reporting requires larger UK companies to disclose energy use, carbon emissions and energy efficiency actions within their annual accounts. Qualification depends on size thresholds covering turnover, balance sheet and employee numbers, and a good number of manufacturers are in scope without realising it. We can confirm where your organisation stands.
It is the greenhouse gas emissions associated with a single product rather than the organisation as a whole. Most customer requests are for a cradle-to-gate footprint, covering everything from raw material extraction through to the point the product leaves the factory.
The Partnership for Carbon Transparency methodology sets out how cradle-to-gate product carbon footprints should be calculated and exchanged between companies, so that a figure produced by a supplier can be used directly by its customer without recalculation.
If you supply manufacturers with net zero commitments, the question tends to arrive eventually. The first footprint takes the longest, mostly because of supply chain data, so companies that begin ahead of the request are usually the ones who answer it well.
If your customers have started asking about product-level carbon data, or you would like Scope 1, 2 and 3 figures that stand up to scrutiny, we would be glad to help.
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